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Climate Panel Struggles With Media Plan

By Andrew C. Revkin July 10, 2010 9:59 amJuly 10, 2010 9:59 am

The 831 researchers who will contribute to the next round of assessments of climate science and policy options by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been sent a letter admonishing them to “keep a distance from the media” and send any press inquiries about the work of their author groups to supervisors.

[July 12, 1:01 p.m. | Updated The Columbia Journalism Review has posted a piece on “Mediaphobia.” There are nice posts on the panel’s communication efforts by Bryan Walsh at Time Magazine and Kate Mackenzie at the Financial Times.][3:37 p.m. | Updated At the bottom of this post I’ve linked to a three-page “media backgrounder” that the climate panel sent to assessment authors on Saturday. It’s fascinating reading.]

On Friday, one recipient of the letter, Edward R. Carr, an associate professor of geography at the University of South Carolina who will work on the assessment of climate impacts and adaptation options, complained about the letter in a post on his blog under the heading “Apparently we have learned nothing….”

He warned that the panel appears stuck in a “bunker mentality” that will do little to build its credibility after a trying year of attacks by foes of restrictions on greenhouse gases and skeptics of climate science. In an e-mail message alerting me to Carr’s post, Mickey Glantz, a University of Colorado specialist in climate impacts in poor regions who has been an author on previous panel reports, said he agreed with Carr, adding: “I think the I.P.C.C. is on the wrong path.”

I know a number of supervising authors of the forthcoming reports are eager to revise policies and stress openness. There’s plenty of advice on the way from committees reviewing the panel’s practices. I also understand the reflexes involved here, particularly given how some media overplayed claims that the climate panel had erred in parts of its 2007 assessment.

But any instinct to pull back after being burned by the news process is mistaken, to my mind. As I explained to a roomful of researchers at the National Academy of Sciences last year, in a world of expanding communication options and shrinking specialized media, scientists and their institutions need to help foster clear and open communication more than ever. Clampdowns on press access almost always backfire.

When I was sent a copy of the letter Friday morning by another climate researcher, I immediately forwarded it to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the climate panel, along with several supervising authors and press officers for the panel. Friday night, Pachauri sent this response (ascribing the delay to the time different in India, where he lives):

My advice to the authors on responding to the media is only in respect of queries regarding the I.P.C.C. Some of them are new to the I.P.C.C., and we would not want them to provide uninformed responses or opinions. We now have in place a structure and a system in the I.P.C.C. for outreach and communications with the outside world. The I.P.C.C. authors are not employed by the I.P.C.C., and hence they are free to deal with the media on their own avocations and the organizations they are employed by. But they should desist at this stage on speaking on behalf of the I.P.C.C.

I sent this followup question (e-mail shorthand is cleaned up a bit):

I can see instances where reporters from, say, South Africa, would want to interview participating authors from their country about their role, their plans, their approach. Would that be off limits?

Here’s Pachauri’s reply:

Not at all. They can certainly speak about such issues, but it would be inappropriate and premature for them to offer an opinion on what would go into a working group report or what the I.P.C.C. plans to do. In such cases they must direct the query to the appropriate authority as I have advised them to do.

We are only trying to bring some order into the system precisely because we would like to be more transparent and systematic in responding to the media’s growing interest in climate change — which we welcome greatly.

I sent Pachauri’s response to Edward Carr to get his reaction, and here it is:

Pachauri’s response is legitimate – but that is not really how his message in the letter was phrased. If this was the concern, he should have simply said “please do not speak on behalf of the I.P.C.C.” — a standard admonition, even in academia, for those of us who engage in public outreach. I’m not saying that he is disingenuous in his response to you — but that the letter was itself tone-deaf. For an organization that now “has in place a structure and a system” for outreach, you would think that someone might have picked up that this paragraph will play right into the hands of the climategate crowd, making it look like those of us on the I.P.C.C. are engaged in back-room dealings. Optics are everything these days, and this letter utterly failed in that regard.

This, in the end, was the point of my blog post — the global change community remains absolutely terrible at outreach and publicity. I was part of the Millennium Assessment, which very few people outside of the environmental field have ever heard about. I was a lead author of UNEP’s GEO-4 (along with Mickey), and the general public doesn’t know about that report. My mother (for heaven’s sake, my mother!) complains that she never hears anything about the global assessments in the news . . . and I, for one, don’t blame the media. In the end, the organizations running these assessments have a responsibility to take PR seriously. And they simply do not.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.